Essay/Foreword second edition

The inspiration, the encouragement, the spirit was Horace Finaly, a Hungarian Jew émigré to France, who became the president of the Banque de Paris et des Pays Bas, a great financier, scholar, humanist, philosopher, reader of the Greek classics in their original language, a repository of old and wise Platonic traditions. He gives the name to the School which publishes this book.

The clairvoyance, the rigour, the structure, the two or three brilliant intuitions, and the hundreds of resourceful solutions and suggestions added to them, as the bodywork to a Mercedes motor, all his life (over three quarters of a century) dedicated to give shape to a general economic, social and political system, in the field of phenomena, and an unshakable faith in the field of transcendence: this is the work of Agustí Chalaux.

The loving, capable, orderly, exact editing task of this work, belongs to Magda Grau. I met her when she was still a child among other children, in a meeting at the Helping Capuchins, in the Ciutat Vella district of Barcelona. Every week those teenagers met freely to listen awkwardly to the teacher's living voice, that of Agustí Chalaux. She persevered. She studied economics. And shaped as a book, this book, what Agustí explained, that others of us listened to and tried to put down in more imperfect editions.

In these brief first lines I cannot resist the temptation to put on paper the three fundamental (in my opinion) intuitions of Finaly-Chalaux:

Currency, besides being a title of right of possession of some goods of a given value, is the necessary information to be able to demand all the pertinent, social responsibilities, if the currency is explanatory of what has been bought and sold with it.

This responsbile currency allows a general accounting of a given geopolitical community and will point out, except in the case of disastrous exceptions, an unsuspected overvalue of a social kind, independent from the private overvalue generated by the companies.

This overvalue, now hidden, is stolen by individuals, and it is necessary for it to be managed by the democratic state, in the name of the above-mentioned community, in order to finance the life, the social security and all the vocational professions (teachers, doctors, priests, politicians, judges, artists...) and to show the purchase of all the useful production surpluses useful to an improved production.